Not surprising that robbing Peter to pay Paul is very
popular with
Paul.

The House of Representatives voted to provide an emergency $2 billion
for the "cash for clunkers" program on Friday, and the White House
declared the program very much alive, even though car buyers appear to
have already snapped up the $1 billion that Congress originally
appropriated.

Hell, why stop with $2 billion? Make it 20!

Both New Hampshire Congresscritters voted for it, of course.
Grant Bosse at NH Watchdog is on target as usual.

The dead weight loss to the American economy is
staggering. Thousands of perfectly good cars will be scrapped because
Congress wants to curry favor with car dealers and car companies.
Reader William Albenzi reminds me of the Broken
Window Parable, in which destruction is mistaken for economic
activity. Regardless of the cost to the Treasury, the cost of scrapping
functional automobiles for a marginal increase in fuel economy is huge.
Even weighed on purely environmental grounds, the benefits of increases
as small as one mile per gallon must be offset by the sheer tonnage of
rusting hulks added to American scrapyards.

And a number of people are noting the wisdom of a New Yorker, reported
by the local TV station:

"If they can't administer a program like this, I'd be a little concerned
about my health insurance," car salesman Rob Bojaryn said.

Ya think?

On a self-interested note,
it's System Administrator Appreciation Day.
(Are we so starved for appreciation that we need one? Guess so.) So if your
local sysadmin looks mopey, do something to buck him, or her, up.

Coraline

This animated horror story is allegedly for kids,
but—geez—I'd want to make sure your kid
is pretty much immune to scary and disturbing images and
intense situations.

Coraline is a smart and funny little girl, stuck with parents who aren't
very nice to her, and stuck in an out-of-the way old house with oddball
creepy neighbors. One night she discovers a doorway to some sort of
alternate reality, where she meets her "Other Mother" and "Other
Father", and various magically wondrous things happen.

The only
off-putting thing, at first, is the Others' eyes: they're buttons.
But everything else is a huge improvement! And the only downside is that
Coraline keeps getting zapped back to the real world every morning.

Alas, things are not what they seem, and Coraline is
called upon to be brave, clever, and resourceful in order to save
herself, her real parents, and other victims of the surprisingly
evil villain.

It's a very imaginative film, a stop-motion animation fest, and (sorry
to use this cliché) visually stunning. A feast for the eyes. Lots
of details zip right by, and I'm sure multiple viewings would be
rewarding.

But (as I said) it might give your sensitive kiddos nightmares.
Actually, I wouldn't have been too surprised if it had given me
nightmares.

Consumer note: the DVD has a 3-D version on one side that you can view
with red-green glasses. We didn't do that.

Stimulus Lies

I've belatedly added NH
Watchdog to my bloglist; it's run by the Josiah Bartlett Center for
Public Policy, and it's probably not good for my blood pressure. For
example, it led me to this
Union Leader editorial describing how $2 million in Federal
"stimulus" funds is being used:

Here is the Obama administration's idea for how to stimulate the New
Hampshire economy: Provide Boston commuters with free buses.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Friday that it is
sending $2 million in stimulus money to the state DOT to buy four buses.

I won't cut-n-paste the whole thing, but read it yourself:
it's brief, eloquent,
and depressing. One Peter Rogoff of the "Federal Transit Administration" is
quoted:

These funds are creating jobs now while investing in the future of our
transit systems.

The skeptical Union Leader asked Jim Jalbert, the guy who runs the
buses, how many "new jobs" would be created. His answer: four, maybe
five. The math is pretty simple: that's $400K-$500K per job.

Now, I don't know Jim; even though we both live in scenic Rollinsford
NH,
we don't run in the same circles. It's a good bet that my property
taxes would be higher if he weren't around, so I'm grateful for that.
I'd like to say this is a payback to a reliable Democratic Party
contributor, but a quick check of OpenSecrets.org shows
that he's a GOP guy, and
his political sympathies, if anything, are a couple notches to the
right of mine.
I'm sympathetic, because he operates a service that's highly regulated
and his competition, such that it is, is also highly subsidized.
He has a response further down on the editorial's web page, which you
should read. But I think the conclusions are unavoidable:

Painting the $2 million as job-creating "stimulus" is dishonest. It's a
handout, plain and simple.

If bus service is really that popular, it should be supportable by its
passengers.

If that $2 million were left in private hands, people might use it to choose to
support bus service, they might not.

The jobs that would have been created from the (theoretical) $2
million in private hands are "unseen" (read Bastiat
for a refresher on that). I bet it would be more than four
or five, though.

The point is: the folks running
the "stimulus" would prefer not to take the chance you would make the
"wrong" choice, and create the "wrong" jobs.

A Darkness More Than Night

Michael Connelly is on the short list of authors I'm trying to catch up
with. By my count, this 2001 book was his tenth novel, and he's
currently up around twenty. At this rate… ah, it's too depressing
to think about.

But Connelly's really, really, good. If you like hard-boiled crime
fiction, you'll like him. This one is long, about 470 paperback pages,
but it's a page turner.

It has two main characters, both from previous Connelly books: Terry
McCaleb from Blood Work, and Harry Bosch from a lot of
previous books. McCaleb is fragile, a heart transplant patient taking
over fifty pills a a day. He's married to the sister of his heart's
previous owner (long story there), and is living a more or less
contented life on Catalina.

But in his previous life, McCaleb was an FBI profiler, one of the best.
A stumped local cop pulls him into a murder case, and McCaleb's investigation
points to an unlikely suspect: the aforementioned
LAPD detective Harry Bosch, who had tried and failed to nail the
victim for the murder of a prostitute.

What's going on?
Harry has been the hero of a number of previous Connelly books, but he's
always been a little less likeable and a little more squirrelly than
your traditional crime fiction protagonist. Could he have gone that
far around the bend, though?

Anyway, it's a compelling and suspenseful read, with a thrilling climax,
a satisfying conclusion, and a surprise twist right at the very end.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Going to see the latest HP movie has become a tradition for us.
We waited for a week, though, and the Saturday afternoon showing at the Strand
Theatre
was sparsely attended.
If you want to see it, you might want to brush up on what's gone
previously. I'd forgotten some points, like exactly who/what the
death-eaters are. (And even now that I know who the "Half-Blood Prince"
is, I'm not sure why he's called that, or why it's important.)

It's Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts, there's a new professor (Slughorn,
played amusingly by Jim Broadbent), Snape is still moody and dark, and
Dumbledore assigns Harry to find out what's going on. This seems
to be a task that for which Harry is woefully inadequate, but (as in
previous entries in the series), he always seems to do an adequate job
and survive until the end of the film.

Also, there's an amusing subplot about raging teenage hormones;
prospective wizards have those too. Much talk about "snogging"; I wonder
if they considered releasing the movie with American subtitles?

But if you've read the books, you know that the ending of this, the
penultimate one in the series, is not a
happy one. The final book is being made into two final movies,
which only shows that the filmmakers know people like us too well.

Bob Bestiani: I'd Be a Bigger Porker Than Carol Shea-Porter

Our Congresswoman, Carol Shea Porter proudly reported today that she had
secured all of $1.5 million to fund two local New Hampshire projects.
One million of this was for streetscape improvements in the Gaslight
District in Manchester and $500,000 for infrastructure improvements for
the Berwick Bridge in Somersworth.

Great, thank you! In the meantime, the State Department of
Transportation has a Red List of 77 bridges most in need of repair. The
projected cost, according to DOT, would be $403 million. The DOT
estimates that there are resurfacing needs on highways that would cost
$58.7 million. A quick calculation shows that this appropriation
represents 3/10 of one percent of what New Hampshire needs.

I guess the fight against pork-barrel earmarks is over, when the
NH GOP's best and brightest can only complain that the Democrats
are ineffective at it.

It's not as if better lines of attack against Spendocracy aren't
available. Here is a Word doc from the Josiah Bartlett
Center's Grant Bosse (from back in January) with a more focused look:

The New Hampshire Department of Transportation Wish List for spending
the anticipated federal windfall from the Obama Administration ignores
legislative priorities from the Ten Year Transportation Improvement
Plan, and misses an opportunity to fix every Red List bridge in the
state.

The big culprit: the DOT asking for a cool $300 million for
implementing commuter rail on the Lowell-Nashua-Manchester line.
Not only are the upfront priorities dubious, at best
a new commuter rail line would put NH on the hook for ongoing
subsidies, roughly forever.

Last Chance Harvey

A perfectly pleasant little movie with first class acting and no
surprises. You can get most of what's going on by looking at the
DVD box over there: Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, London.

Dustin plays Harvey Shine, a musician who's been reduced
to writing music for commercials, and even that's in jeopardy.
He's in London for his daughter's wedding, but he seems
doomed to remain on the periphery of events, placed in a hotel while
the rest of the wedding party stays in a rented house. Worse, his
daughter wants handsome new daddy Brian to give her away.

Meanwhile, Emma plays Kate Walker, who seems to be well on her
way to old-maid status. She has a job interviewing incoming tourists
at Heathrow; her co-workers try to set her up,
but it doesn't work out.

So (yes) these two lonely people find each other. It's an OK movie, and
it's always difficult for me to take my eyes off Emma
Thompson. It follows the usual romantic comedy plot: setup, meet-cute,
getting-to-know-you, crisis, reconciliation.
Very short at 93 minutes, and they take their sweet time
in telling the story, so there's not much to it.

URLs du Jour

2009-07-23

My very own Congressperson, Carol Shea-Porter is featured at
Hot Air, and is skewered by Captain Ed for her remarks on
health care.

"I just wanted to make a couple of comments. I heard one of my
colleagues say 'waiting in line,' that people would be waiting in line
for medical care. I would like to say that many of my constituents would
love to wait in line for medical care," Shea-Porter stated. "They are
yanked out of line because they don't have coverage."

Carol's solution means that everyone will wait in line.
Ed points out that, for people in the Obama/Shea-Porter mindset,
the real issue isn't improving health care; it's a fetishistic
imposition of "equality".

Skip at GraniteGroknotes
the latest embarrassment associated with the University System of New
Hampshire, the final
(PDF) report from the "Governor's Task Force on Young Worker
Retention". Page 13 deserves special attention:

The Task Force received several comments regarding the issue of branding
the state that would help attract and retrain young workers. Through
input and discussions, there is strong sentiment that the "live free or
die" slogan does not connect with this demographic and that something
else is needed.

How about "Get the Hell Off My Lawn"?

Skip is eloquent in his takedown of this nonsense.

Apparently at last night's news conference, President Obama accused
doctors of getting rich off unnecessary tonsillectomies. Frank J helps out with some possible strategies
if your kid's doctor is playing this game. For example:

Take your child's medical files and send [them] to Barack Obama. He or
another qualified bureaucrat will determine whether the operation is
necessary.

Actual
physicians are more diplomatic in expressing their disagreement.
(Remarkably so, given the president's intimation that they were all a
bunch of greedy slimeballs.)

Shut Up, Hurry Up, Pay Up, Drop Dead

In a conference call to lefty bloggers last night, President Obama revealed
his "shut up" strategy:

While [Obama] refused to insist that lawmakers stay in Washington during the
August recess, he declared definitively that, "the time for talk is
through."

Of course, he wasn't asking the lefties to shut up. What he means
is that the time for deliberation and careful consideration is over.
(That time was from 3-5pm on Friday, April 17. Sorry if you missed it.)

But—wait a minute—the White House also floated
a different "shut up" argument the day before:

President Barack Obama's advisers are urging critics of their health
care overhaul to wait for Congress to finish writing legislation before
issuing verdicts.

So either the "time for is talk through" or it's not here yet. Either way,
the message is clear: shut up.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is
passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest
justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama's poll numbers
return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle
government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply
growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new
program.

It makes a perfect complement to the "shut up" demand.

The "pay up" part is also being handwaved around. The main idea
here is to obfuscate the winners and losers, but math says that
if you have to come up with a trillion (and probably more) over
the next ten years, there are gonna be a lot of losers. Nancy
Pelosi, in a meeting with USA Today's editorial board
used revealing language:

"Many members think there's more to be squeezed from hospitals,
pharmaceutical companies and docs out of this bill," Pelosi said. "I
believe there's more to be squeezed."

Squeezed, huh?
All together now, folks: Moooooo

The same article also quotes a Senator:

Finance chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., emerged from a meeting late Monday
to say members are considering several new ideas to pay for health care
legislation proposed by Obama's budget chief, Peter Orszag.

"They're interesting, they're creative," Baucus said. "Some of them are
kinda fun. But I don't go farther... who knows which ones we're going to
agree to or not."

Fun! Well, kinda fun. The main point: he's the one having fun.
Good luck on finding out how much fun you're going to have
until it's too late to do anything about it.

Finally,
one item that might benefit from additional scrutiny and deliberation
is section
1233 of the House bill, which is currently titled "ADVANCE CARE PLANNING
CONSULTATION", but probably could be renamed to something like "WOULD
YOU FOR CHRISSAKE JUST DIE ALREADY TO SAVE US SOME MONEY". It requires seniors
to get a tutorial from a "practitioner" on end-of-life issues. No word
on whether the "practitioner" would need to wear a hooded black cloak
and carry a scythe.

Forget all the kind rhetoric about "dignity". Let's call it what it is:
Geriatric Euthanasia. And let's be very clear about why we want the old
people to die: We've sucked all the economic productivity we're going
to get out of them, and it's more convenient to kill them than it is to
assume the financial burden of their care. You can pretty it up with
all the flowery language you want, but at the end of the day, it comes
down to, "You cost too much to keep alive. Just die."

In other words: When your troika is headed down the Road to Serfdom, you need
to toss the occasional poor sap to the wolves in pursuit.

URLs du Jour

"Now look.
Everyone shut up. You don't know a damned thing about
what's going on here tonight, and that's why people like
myself are needed in the world.
I
want to tell you what
in
hell it means. This is the
greatest
night you will ever know!

"There are two nights the Western world will look back
upon a million years from tonight. A million years!
I'm not talking about a hundred or a thousand years.
I'm talking about a million years from tonight.

"The birth of Christ probably is a very important date
that changed the world in many ways for the better and,
in some ways, for not very much good at all.

"But the second most important date is this night that
we're going through right now. Because it's the night when
we become immortal-when we begin the steps that
will
enable us to live forever. Now, if you don't know this,
you don't know anything about space."

Only 999,960 years to go to find out if Ray was right.

William Kristol looks
at a Newsweek essay by Teddy Kennedy and Robert Shrum on
health care "reform" and detects policy prescriptions that could be
characterized as "rationing". From their godlike perch, Shrum and
Kennedy detect "unnecessary" procedures that could easily be abolished
by easy-peasy new regulations and payment schedules.

Riiiiight. Sure they could.

But, as Kristol notes, that alleged totally-sensible reform
could happen with Medicare right now,
without the the whole "universal coverage" thing. If it's such
a great idea, why don't they
do that first?

Drudge is all over the bizarre "stimulus" spending
data posted at recovery.gov.
My "favorite" so far: $1,444,100
to "REPAIR DOOR BLDG 5112" at Dyess AFB just outside Abilene, TX.

Prayers for the Assassin

Robert Ferrigno came to my attention via a 2004 Slatearticle
where various authors were asked for their presidential voting choices.
The folks voting for Dubya were vastly outnumbered: Orson Scott Card,
Roger L. Simon, Thomas Mallon, and Ferrigno. Here's his explanation:

Mark me on the Bush side of the ledger, a lonely side for this survey,
I'm certain. Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine
place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking. I don't agree
with Bush on shoveling free meds to granny and grandpa, or his antipathy
to fuel conservation along with opening up the arctic reserve, but this
is small stuff. I'll be voting for Bush because his approach to stopping
the people who want to kill my children is the right one, i.e., kill
them first. Kerry will dance the Albright two-step with Kim Jong-il,
consult with Sandy Berger's socks, and kowtow to the U.N. apparatchiks
who have done such a fine job of protecting the Cambodians, Rwandans,
and the Sudanese. No thanks. No contest.

Uh, wow. At the time, I was reading the Usenet group rec.arts.mystery;
the above caused at least one sensitive soul to drop Ferrigno from her
reading list. But it put him right on mine.

Ferrigno had been writing rather straightforward hard-boiled crime
fiction, but this is a thriller set in a nightmarish near future.
It's premised on nuclear terrorist attacks in 2015 which leaves New
York City and Washington D. C. in rubble; a dirty bomb
has rendered Mecca radioactive for the next few dozen millennia. The
attacks are
convincingly pinned on Mossad agents. This causes massive conversions
to Islam in the US,
and an eventual civil war between the
evangelical-Christian old south and just about everyone else. Israel is
destroyed, and everywhere else the market for kosher food goes way, way
down.

The main part of the book is set when things have settled, thirty
years later. Seattle, the new capital, is a mixture of religious
despotism, ecological wasteland, and tolerated libertinism. (Go out of
the cities, though, and things have devolved into a nasty-brutish-short
Hobbesian fantasy.)
The protagonist, Rakkim, is an ex-Fedayeen, ex-cop, now
making a living transporting refugees to the relative safety of Canada.
His true love, Sarah, has gone into hiding while doing historical
research into the terrorist attacks. Her uncle, who happens to be
Director of State Security, appeals to Rakkim to track her down. But
even more deadly and mysterious figures also want to get their hands on
Sarah. Conspiracy, betrayal, and danger abounds.

I don't know that an Islamic takeover of much of the US is very
credible, but, on the other hand, I don't know that it isn't
either. That aside,
Ferrigno's imagined world is meticulously researched, much
based on practices in actual "Islamic republics".

The book is the first in a trilogy, so I'm signed up for the others
as well.

Knowing

Well, here's the story: In 1959, a Lexington, Massachusetts
elementary school class draws pictures for inclusion in a time
capsule. The only exception is strange little Abby, who insists
on covering the page with digits. Nevertheless, it goes in with the
other students' work.
Jump to the present day, the time capsule is opened, and
Abby's number list falls into the hands of young Caleb Koestler.
His widowed semi-alcoholic father
John, played by Nicolas Cage, is intrigued, and
eventually works out that it's a chronicle of disasters, describing
the time and place of major losses of human life. And only most
of them are in the past.

The rest of the movie chronicles John's frantic efforts to figure
out what's going on and see if Abby's final prediction of
disaster—and as you can probably dope out from the DVD box over
there, it's kind of a biggie—can be prevented.

Spoiler: nope, sorry humanity.

The only out is these weird, slightly
menacing, folks hovering around Caleb (and also, as it happens, Abby's
granddaughter). What's up with them?

I'm not a fan of movies where nothing the
characters do make the slightest bit of difference to the final outcome.
(Although they go through a lot of anguish on the way.)
The movie also adds in heavy dollops of new-agey sophomoric
mysticism, which
also irritates.

Perverse Incentives

This
econ course handout reports on the experiences of econ prof
Judith
Thornton, now at the University of Washington. When Professor
Thornton was a student in Moscow she noted "...the small, blue metal
lamp on my dormitory desk was so heavy it took two people to lift it.
The lamp base had been filled with lead ..."

Here are a couple hints about what was going on: (1) This was while the Soviet
Union existed; (2) Soviet factory managers were given "output targets"
to meet and were incentivized to exceed them. The handout asks:

Predict the basis on which the quota of the lamp factory was set.

What do you think?

Professor Thornton also reported on what happened when the lamp's bulb
burnt out and she went shopping for a replacement: all she could find
were "...tiny night lights or giant flood lights but not bulbs suitable
for a desk lamp." This was the result of a changed output target.
The handout asks you to fill in the blanks:

The output target that resulted in thousands of tiny night lights was
_________________. When the output target was changed to ______________,
the result was giant flood lights.

A state commission recommended yesterday that Massachusetts dramatically
change how doctors and hospitals are paid, essentially putting providers
on a budget as a way to control exploding healthcare costs and improve
the quality of care.

The 10-member commission, which includes key legislators and members of
Governor Deval Patrick’s administration, voted unanimously to
largely scrap the current system, in which insurers typically pay
doctors and hospitals a negotiated fee for each individual procedure or
visit. That arrangement is widely seen as leading to unneeded tests and
procedures.

Think of patients as the Soviet lamps and lightbulbs, and doctors and
hospitals as the Soviet factory managers, responding to incentives
imposed under a grand "reform" plan.

Then ask yourself: what's the health-care
analog of Professor Thornton not being
able to find a replacement bulb for her impossibly heavy blue desk lamp?

Arnold's comments are eloquently on target, and I'll just swipe them:

Maybe the commission's proposal is a step in the right direction. Even
if it is, I would suggest that perhaps no expert knows how to design the
health care system. We may need a lot of trial and error. Government
takeover means that you try something new every few years...maybe. Your
choices are limited because entrenched interests preclude many options.

With markets, trial and error takes place continuously. A lot more
things get tried. Failure gets weeded out more ruthlessly.

Of course, no one on the Left believes that. The core belief there is
that experts know best, and that experts are only thwarted by evil
corporations and stupid conservatives. The notion that no expert knows
very much, and that the evolution of market processes produces better
outcomes, is too threatening to contemplate.

I'll extend that: the old Soviet planners were not (exactly) stupid, but
they were operating under the worldview that their economic "system" was
entirely rational and capable of producing prosperity.

Today, we know they were wrong, but advocates of "health care reform"
are operating under a similar hubris: myriads of regulations, subsidies,
taxes, and penalties will give us a "system" where everyone will
thrive and prosper. Any chance we'll take the right lesson from
the Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts, before the country
as a whole wanders down that road?

Laughing All The Way

There are differing opinions as to what location
deserves the title of "The Happiest Place on Earth". Some say
Disneyland, some say Denmark. But as near as I
can tell, nobody thinks it's the Bureau of Public Debt. They
describe their task thusly:

Our job is to borrow the money needed to operate the federal government
and to account for the resulting debt.

In other words, for someone who cares about the fiscal health of the
nation, it must be a damnably depressing place to work.

This is a sources sought notice and not a request for quotations. The
purpose of this announcement is to seek qualified contractors with the
capability to provide presentations for The Department of Treasury,
Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD), Management Meeting with experience in
meeting the objectives as described herein.

The Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace
programs that will discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the
close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the
most important ways that we communicate in business and office life.

So—let me get this straight—managers
are trying to learn how to
be funny in the workplace.

Everyone who has read more than three Dilbert cartoons knows:
this is hopeless. What kind of a joke would managers in the Bureau of
Public Debt find amusing?

Q: How many managers in the Bureau of Public Debt does it take to
borrow $7,238,613,847,252.09 from the public?

A: All of them.

They go into more detail on what they're looking for:

Participants shall experience demonstrations of cartoons being created
on the spot. The contractor shall have the ability to create cartoons on
the spot about BPD jobs.

Cartoons? Really?

I can't help but think that BPD-specific cartoons wouldn't be very funny
at all.

The presenter shall refrain from using any foul
language during the presentation. This is a business environment and we
need the presenter to address a business audience.

The BPD doesn't make it easy; try looking at this graph without
using foul language:

Understand the importance and power of humor in the workplace in a
responsible manner

How to use talents in a creative way that adds
humor to everyday experiences

Alleviate stress in home and the
office

Know how and why humor is important to communication

Improve
work-place relationships

Prevent burn-out

Keep in mind that it takes scores
of living, breathing Federal employees to write this stuff,
approve it, put it on the web, handle responses, etc. And
nothing that comes out of this process will be amusing in the slightest.

A Bureau of Public Debt manager
and a taxpayer are in a bank, when armed robbers suddenly burst in. While
several of the robbers take the money from the tellers, others line the
customers up against a wall, and proceed to take
their wallets, watches, etc.

While this is going on, the BPD manager jams something in the taxpayer's
hand.

Without looking down, the taxpayer whispers, "What is this?"

To which the BPD manager replies, "It's that $7,238,613,847,252.09 I owe you."

Personally, I think they'd get better results just
running six hours' worth of Marx Brothers movies.

I went to visit the Bureau of Public Debt. There was a sign on the
door: "Cashier has less than $10,000,000,000,000.00 at any time."

Anyone got more?

The village idiot was giving a talk before an AARP chapter.
"We're going to go bankrupt as a nation," said the idiot.

"Well, people that I say that to say, 'What are you talking about,
you're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going
bankrupt?'" the idiot said. "The answer is yes, I'm telling you."

Oops, not much of a punchline. Because, unfortunately, that one's not a joke.

URLs du Jour

Why, it's written so a 15-year-old could understand it! Please fetch me
a 15-year-old.

The Washington Post is editorially opposed
to the House Democrat plan to fund "health care reform" via a huge
surtax on high-income taxpayers. Good for them, but for true
eloquence on the general topic, read Captain Ed at Hot
Air:

Nowhere in the Democrats' plan do they explain why 2.1
million Americans should have to pay to reform the health-care system
for 300 million Americans, nor does the Post explain why 2.1 million
Americans should have to pay for the massive deficits created by
Democrats in Congress and Barack Obama. Both accept the notion
that government exists to transfer wealth without explaining at all the
basis for a free government to do so. If we need massive
health-care reform, then the costs should be borne by everyone
-- and when that happens, you will find massive health-care reform to be
a lot less popular than when Obama, Rangel, & Co try to pass it off
as something for nothing.

This President and Congress have already decided - like the apocryphal
Winston
Churchill story - that the "rich" are a piggy bank to be smashed in
perpetuity. Now they're just haggling over the price.

We've mentioned
before that once you swallow the "progressive taxation" pill, you
lose any objective notion of fairness or equitability in the tax code.
A politics that promises you goodies that you won't have to pay for
is inherently corrosive to liberty and limited government; looks
as if we're gonna find out how much.

When they run out of rich people to tax, though, it turns out potheads look promising.

I don't want to seem like a fulltime Richard Feynman blogger, but
Bill Gates bought the rights to the "Character of Physical Law"
lecture series that Feynman gave at Cornell back in 1964.
And's Bill's put them up here.
(I'm pretty sure you're out of luck unless your browser can handle
Microsoft "Silverlight" content.) The lectures are "annotated" with
various links, pictures, and subtitles, clearly a labor of love.
There's more background at John Tierney's blog here.

I'm not sure how accessible the lectures are to everyone, although Bill Gates
says that his 10-year-old son can grasp them. (You can consider that a
challenge if you want.) I watched the first one
last night, and thought Feynman did a great job of communicating the
wonder of universal gravitation: the grand mechanism that holds galaxies
together also handles the mundane chore
of keeping your ass in your chair. I liked it; you might too.

Did I see an "Evony" ad over there on the right at some point? For all I
know,
maybe there's one there now.) Anyway, they can be, um, eye-catching; you
may have seen them elsewhere.

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has done some
research and concludes that Evony ads "take advertising on the
internet to the absolute rock bottom." See what you think. Warning:
it has to do with increasing cleavage, and it's illustrated. (Via Galley Slaves.)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Note: the old version. I'd seen this when it came out back in the 70s.
The recent remake with Denzel Washington and John Travolta caused
John
Nolte to reminisce, and mainly point out that the new version was
significantly worse. That was enough of an incentive to queue it up at
Netflix.

It's a taut little thriller, kicked off when Robert Shaw and three other
guys hijack a subway train in Manhattan. (The "Pelham One Two Three"
terminology means that the
train originally left Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx at 1:23pm.) They
demand a million bucks for their hostages, and their main communications
conduit to the outside world goes through everyschlub Walter Matthau,
playing transit cop Zach Garber.

It's much different from today's thrillers. The body count remains low.
Although there's violence, the screenwriter didn't feel compelled
to plug in a scene of gratuitous mayhem every few minutes, lest the audience be bored.
Acting is first rate, and there are some funny bits. (On the other
hand, there's a lot of f-wordage (etc.), in a way that did feel
gratuitous. I think that was an early-70's phenomenon.)

It was kind of fun to see Doris Roberts as a super-cynical wife of New
York's mayor, and Jerry Stiller in a supporting cop role.

And the last shot is classic, one of my all-time favorite movie magic moments.

President Obama wrote (well, put his name on) an op-ed
column in Saturday's Washington Post. Interesting
rebuttals:

Keith
Hennessey decries the President's historical revisionism. Keith was
Dubya's senior economic advisor, so he's compelled to defend that
record, but feel free to discount that. One of his points is especially
on target, where he considers the President's (convenient) plea for
patience, because his stimulus "was, from the start, a two-year program":

This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have
front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to
the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008.
We would have saved much of it, paying off our mortgages, student loans,
and credit cards (which would not be a bad thing). We would have spent
the rest much more quickly than the federal and state government
bureaucracies now stumbling through their usual corrupt, slow and
inefficient processes. Instead the President handed the money and
program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big
honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy.
The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing
Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending
interest-based binge.

Indeed. Let's not forget John
Kerry's honesty back in February when he explained why he
opposed stimulative tax cuts: "If you put a tax cut into the hands of a
business or family, there's no guarantee that they're going to invest
that or invest it in America.
They're free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to
invest." Much better to leave those "investment" choices safely
in the hands of Democratic politicians.

[…] here are some words you won’t find: profits, investment, incentives,
taxes, risk, enterprise or markets. Or freedom, or liberty.

Also missing: capital/capitalism, private, regulation.

We're in bad shape when the President can't even pay his
usual lip service to free markets and capitalism.

At Pajamas Media, Jennifer Rubin concentrates
on the bipartisan reaction to the Administration's claim
to be taken unaware by the seriousness of the economic
meltdown. Everyone agrees: it doesn't pass the giggle
test with anyone with a memory longer than a few months.

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist whose Nobel-prizewinning
research could make one's head spin. (And he'd be happy to point out
that your head was conserving angular momentum while spinning.)

But he was unparalleled at exploring and explaining more mundane topics
too. Check out
the video where he describes how
trains stay on the track. Without even a chalkboard, a 147-second
masterpiece of teaching. (Via GeekPress.)

Monsoon Wedding

Recommended by a blogger with impeccable taste, it was pretty good, if a
bit soap-operaish.

It's mostly a drama with heavy comic relief. The Vermas, an upper-middle-class
Punjabi family in New Delhi, are in
chaos as they prepare for the arranged marriage of daughter Aditi.
Father Lalit is getting stretched financially.
Scores of relatives are incoming (some from Australia and America) for
the multi-day celebration. But there are plenty of problems under the
surface: Aditi's still into hanky-panky with her married co-worker.
Her cousin, Ria, is without romantic prospects and (for some reason)
regarding rich Uncle Tej with barely-disgused hatred.

Fortunately, the Vermas can rely on event planner Dubey for logistics,
technical services, and general wheeling and dealing.
But then Dubey notices the Verma's quiet servant
girl Alice …

Random observations: (1) Although it's not a musical,
people are likely to break out in song and dance
at the slightest provocation. (2) Given the name, I would have expected
a little more rain.
(3) One of the relatives is a dead ringer for
Sonia Sotomayor.

Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama
will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments
and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the
agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the
Internet these debates.

You currently have this promise ranked as "No Action". I'd like to
suggest it be changed to "Promise Broken", based on:

Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning
significant policy decisions, so instructing participants in a policy
negotation concerning a major federal policy change could be viewed as a
criminal act.

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding
"secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But
last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own
administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret
Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited
the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies.

Consumer Reports: Mindless Shills for "Health Care Reform"

Consumer Reports (CR)
devoted nine of the 68 pages in its August 2009
issue to an article titled "A
prescription for health care". I believe it's accurate to say
that it's an unpaid ad for ObamaCare as currently conceived: an
insurance "exchange" containing private plans, but also a "public plan"
run by the government.
Exchanges will be sliding-scale taxpayer-subsidized to accomodate the
non-rich.
Insurers will be required to accept "everyone", and everyone must get
insured. The usual blue-sky handwaving about how current practices
will be reworked (by edict) to make them cheaper and more effective.
And so on.

If you ramble around the political side of the web at all, you
can find plenty of substantive claims, counter-claims, and arguments on all sides of this
issue. I
don't want to duplicate that here, but instead
concentrate on CR's advocacy style:
it's full of Obama-like rhetorical tricks
and fallacies, without Obama's distracting charisma.
Not a full-fledged fisking, just some comments
about things I found irritating and/or amusing.

At the above link, one of the first things you'll read:

On the political right, you'll find conservatives for whom "reform" is
just the first step toward European-style socialism. You've seen their
ads pop up on TV, sponsored by groups you've never heard of, full of
scary warnings about faceless bureaucrats standing between you and
needed care (as if you didn't have that now from insurance companies).

On the flip side, you'll hear some left-leaning commentators claim that
the only solution is to nationalize health care as the British and
Canadians have done. Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of
Consumer Reports, has long argued for stronger government protection for
consumers. But that doesn't mean we'd favor creating a huge new federal
bureaucracy to manage an industry that constitutes a whopping 18 percent
of the economy.

The right solution in today's environment lies somewhere between those
poles.[…]

This is almost the "argument to
moderation" fallacy: what we're advocating is between these
two extremes, so it must be correct.

But look a little closer, and you'll notice it doesn't even
rise to the level of fallacy.
CR doesn't
bother to describe what "conservatives" advocate. So
their "poles" are effectively
(a) the status quo, and (b) complete socialization. Conveniently,
they arrive at
the "moderate" position of halfway-socialization. (That's today. Once
we're halfway there, do you really think we'll stop? There are plenty of
reasons to doubt that.)

Also note the characterization of "conservatives": obscure groups
sponsoring "scary" and (allegedly) misleading TV ads. Accusing the
other side of being fear-mongerers is kind of a reflex on the left these
days; but it rings especially hollow when surrounded by lurid
anecdotes of sick people unable to afford needed medical services,
people driven to financial ruin, and the country as a whole
being bankrupted by skyrocketing health costs.

But we're not fear-mongering; it's those other guys.

Immediately after the above quote:

And it must be a truly American solution, one that takes advantage of
our traditional ingenuity and entrepreneurship while preserving freedom,
fairness, and choice.

CR combines flattery—you're so ingenious and
entreprenurial, America!—with an array of features nobody could be against.

One will, of course, look in vain for any of those features in the
actual policies CR proposes. On this
page, CR tries hard:
they provide the anecdote of a small-business owner struggling
with health benefits costs for employees. It's sad! But their "solution"
doesn't take advantage of "entrepreneurship"; instead it advocates
cost-shifting from the employer to—guess who? You and me, pal.
("Under the health-care reform that we support, small firms that
couldn't otherwise afford coverage could buy it--with a subsidy, if
needed--through the same National Health Insurance Exchange available to
individuals.")

This Obamaesque feint toward moderation is amusing:

Not every reader will agree with each position here, of course, and we
respect those differences of opinion.

This is after they accuse "conservatives" of being
fear-mongering liars, so you might want
to take that with a grain of salt. Like Obama,
CR's "respect"
for differences of opinion doesn't extend to presenting dissenting opinions
fairly.

CR's overview concludes with a stirring call to action—one
that the writer almost certainly imagined himself delivering with a
triumphal trumpet-heavy soundtrack evoking thunderous applause:

Fixing health care will take hard work by many and some degree of
sacrifice by all. But Americans have faced, and conquered, bigger
challenges in the past. Consumers Union thinks the effort is well worth
it. And we support reform as an essential investment in our country's
future, one that will result in lower costs and better health for you,
your family, and the generations to come.

When those moving words just sit there on the page, though, they invite
skepticism: "hard work" and "some degree of sacrifice"—how
much, exactly? And by whom? "Lower costs" and "better
care"—enough to offset the "sacrifice" you're telling me I have
to make?

CR provides no answers to this skepticism, which is unfortunate.
Probably their readers would appreciate an honest, independent take on
costs and benefits, winners and losers under the Democrats' plan.
Instead CR just wields a big rubber stamp: "Don't ask questions,
just trust us."

Even in the webbed version, CR doesn't link to those
"anti-reform" organizations; readers might—heaven
forfend!—check out the opposing arguments for themselves, rather
than rely on CR's caricatures. So I've added the links myself.

It's probably worth pointing out that, while "Patients United Now" and
"Conservatives for Patients' Rights" are straightforwardly opposed
to the "reform" advocated by Obama and CR, throwing "Partnership
to
Improve Patient Care" under the same bus seems misguided. The PIPC website
appears to be a low-key non-ideological advocacy for "Comparative Effectiveness
Research" (something that CR claims to support itself). The PIPC
member list includes such right-wing organizations as
Easter Seals and the National Latina Health Network.

The response to one "fear" reflects the unfortunately long lead time
faced by magazines:

Fear
Health reform will take away the good coverage from your
job.

And how does CR counter that "fear"?

Fact
If you're satisfied with your job-based coverage, you would be able to
keep it.

I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their
health care coverage -- they like their plan and, most importantly, they
value their relationship with their doctor. They trust you. And that
means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this
promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be
able to keep your doctor, period. (Applause.) If you like your health
care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period.
(Applause.) No one will take it away, no matter what.

And a few minutes after that, like CR
he was deriding "naysayers" who were "not telling the truth."

It took about 43 seconds post-speech
for skeptics to say hey, wait a minute!
Eventually Obama had to walk back that language.

But -- as the president acknowledged at his news conference Tuesday --
that's not really a pledge he can promise to deliver on. Private
companies are always free to choose different health plans for their
employees, and that's not something Obama's plan would change.

"When I say if you have your plan and you like it, . . . or you have a
doctor and you like your doctor, that you don't have to change plans,
what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans
under health reform," the president said Tuesday.

While Obama had to admit that his "be able to keep" promises
were empty, apparently CR didn't get the memo in time; they
just echo the President's original talking point uncritically.
Clearly the "Fear" in this case
is more factual than CR's "Fact".

Which is kind of the point of this whole exercise. Consumer
Reports does a decent job of sorting through competing products,
testing for quality, skeptically and independently checking out
producer's claims.

But when it comes to politically-tinged issues, CR drops
its independence and skepticism faster than you can say "Obama's so
dreamy!" They have no problem engaging in the kind of
specious argument that they'd rip to shreds if offered up by a corporate
bigwig.

URLs du Jour

Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not
reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near
future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out
of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the
demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it
will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that
requires energy for its manufacture -- which is to say, for everything.
Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than
the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a
permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate
welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic
bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on
candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic
constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial,
industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently
deform American politics and economic life.

But click on through for details.

If you need a fifty-first reason, however, check out Section
205, a Federal program to emit grants for tree-planting to electric
companies. As long as such trees are planted according to…

a comprehensive list of science-based measurements outlining the species
and minimum distance required between trees planted pursuant to this
section, in addition to the minimum required distance to be maintained
between such trees and (A) building foundations
(B) air conditioning units;
(C) driveways and walkways;
(D) property fences;
(E) preexisting utility infrastructure;
(F) septic systems;
(G) swimming pools; and
(H) other infrastructure as deemed appropriate.

… because we're just too damn dumb to figure this out ourselves,
apparently. As Joyce Kilmer noted:

The Lodger

It's not even close to good, but it's not as bad as the IMDB and
Tomatometer ratings indicate. A Mrs. Salad pick, because she loooves
Simon Baker in The Mentalist TV series.

But here, Simon Baker is not The Mentalist. Instead, he is The
Lodger, a semi-creepy cipher who shows up at the door of the Bunting
household in Hollywood, looking to rent out the guest house out in the back.

Unfortunately, at the same time, serial hooker homicides
are afoot in Hollywood.
The detectives assigned to the case (Manning and Wilkinson,
played by Alfred Molina and Shane
West respectively) can't help but notice the new murders mirror
some "solved" homicides for which a guy named Rodriguez was executed
a number of years back. And (eventually) they notice parallels with
London's Jack
the Ripper.

What's going on? Well, it's one of those movies where they throw up a
lot of red herrings. The killer might, after all, be The Lodger; he's
certainly an odd duck. But Mrs. Bunting (played by Hope Davis) is kind
of quirky too. Her husband keeps telling her to take her
pills—what's that all about? And what about her husband,
who conveniently is out of the house most evenings?

Also Detective Manning has some dysfunctional relationships of his own:
his wife is in the loony bin, and his daughter blames and despises him.
And he's also put on a pile of weight since he was Doc Ock in Spider-Man
2. And he sent that guy Rodriguez to the … chair? gas chamber?
Wherever they execute guys in California these days.

So there are a lot of potential suspects, and eventually it all seems to
be sorted out at the end,… or is it? (One of the problems with
red-herring-laden movies is that you really should play fair with the
viewer and show how all those herrings make
sense in retrospect.
As near as I can tell, this movie doesn't do that.)

In the nothing-new-under-the-sun department: this is the fifth
movie remake of the original source material, a 1913 novel by Marie
Belloc Lowndes. (The 1927 silent version was directed by Alfred
Hitchcock.)

Consumer Reports: Oops

A few
months back we blogged about residents of Spokane, Washington
smuggling dishwasher detergent with phosphates from relatively nearby
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho when those products
were banned in their county.

Consumer Reports in its March 2005 publication concluded that
phosphate-free products work as well regular brands, noting it is the
enzymes and not phosphates that get dishes clean.

Spokanites disagree, apparently.

And now, so does Consumer Reports.
I don't have the March 2005 issue around, but
the most recent issue (August 2009) is pretty
straightforward
about contradicting what they (allegedly) said back then:

Proposed federal legislation to ban
dishwasher detergents containing all but trace amounts of phosphates is
designed to help the environment. But many of the eco-friendly
products in the latest batch we tested are not great at cleaning dishes.

Detergents without
phosphates--which help clean but also boost algae growth in freshwater,
threatening fish and other plants--tended
to perform worst overall.

Something smells bad here, and it ain't the algae.
What happened between 2005 and 2009?
After over four years of R&D, the soap companies have
developed low-phosphate detergents that are actually worse at
cleaning than they were before?

I don't think so. Instead, I suspect low-phosphates
were never very good.

Consumer Reports doesn't come out and say that a phosphate ban
would be a bad idea—they have a reflexive bias in favor of
Federal regulation—but they do note that dishwasher detergents
"have a relatively low level of phosphates." Nobody is particularly
fond of freshwater algal growth, but there are plenty of reasons
to be skeptical that a ban would pass a cost/benefit test.

But the main point here is: you really want to take
reassurances that "eco-friendly" regulations will be pain-free
with a grain of phosphate-free salt.

America Alone

Back when I was a young'un, checking out books on the conservative side
of the spectrum, I read The Suicide of the West by (then) one
of the primary big-thinkers at National Review, James Burnham.
It was about how mid-twentieth-century Western liberalism was
no match for a Communist ideology that was out to bury us.

Old habits die hard, so this book, with its catchy subtitle "The End of
the World As We Know It", by (now) one of the big-thinkers
at National Review was a must (eventually) read.

Steyn's thesis-in-a-nutshell: Europe as a bulwark of enlightened Western
liberalism
is pretty much doomed to eventual domination by radical Islamism.
Part of the problem is raw demographics: the Judeo-Christian/secular
fraction of Europe is failing to reproduce adequately, while the Muslim
population is exploding due to immigration and general fecundity.
Another factor: Europe (either as a whole or individual countries) doesn't
seem to be very interested in defending Western civ, mired in a
cultural impotence that mirrors its lack of reproductive vigor.

At the time of the book's writing, 2006, it was probably easier
to be (relatively) optimistic about America avoiding Europe's fate;
since then, however, we seem to be eagerly marching toward
Europitude as well.

Steyn and Burnham are poles apart in terms of writing style: as far
as I can recall, Burnham could be relatively stuffy. Steyn, as any
recent NR reader knows, is witty and accessible, drawing heavily
on pop culture and telling anecdotes.

The parallel with the Burnham book was much on my mind while reading
this one, though: obviously, we (more or less) muddled through our
fight with ideological Communism, no thanks to liberals. Any way we
can blunder our way through this mess? Steyn's cheerful
style doesn't offer a lot of hope on that score. But, as Yogi said,
predictions are difficult, especially about the future.

Although there's an index, the book is free of footnotes or references.
So that's a quibble: if you want to read the sources behind any of
Steyn's assertions or anecdotes, you'll have to fire up the Google
and do your own digging. (One of the Amazon reviewers says Steyn's just
wrong in his allegations about Muslim fertility rates in Europe. I have
no idea, but it would be nice to know where Steyn's numbers come from.)

The Last King of Scotland

I'm not a violent person, but there's something about James McAvoy that
makes me want to give him a good slap. (I didn't quite consider
Atonement to be a feelgood movie, but I was probably less
depressed by the ending than the average viewer.)

Here, "Slappy" McAvoy plays Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a young doctor
fresh out of medical school who desperately wants to get out from under
the thumb of his stuffy family. Unfortunately, it's the 70s, and he picks
Uganda as his place to go out and do good. (He also has a serious case
of can't-keep-it-in-his-pants-itis.) Via a series of unlikely
occurrences, he finds himself in close orbit around Ugandan dictator Idi
Amin. At first he's charmed and persuaded by Amin's huge charismatic
personality. Only later does he become aware of the flipside: Amin's
also a homicidal maniac. Can't have everything.

Forest Whitaker plays Amin, a role for which he won many plaudits,
including an Oscar for Best Actor. Well-deserved.

Although the movie's obviously based on actual events and people,
the Garrigan character is largely made up; Amin did have
a close relationship with a white advisor, but the advisor was even
less sympathetic than Garrigan. Cracked (my
usual source for insightful movie criticism) has the scoop, where
The Last King of Scotland is number 3 in their article
"6 Movies Based
on a True Story (That Are Also Full of Shit)".

URLs du Jour

The Official Progressive Politician's Guiding Philosophy on
Tax Fairness and Equity:

You got the money.

We want the money.

So gimme the money.

… or so it seems. At Cato, David Boaz remembers
that Senator Barbara Mikulski, in a refreshing moment of candor, came
pretty close to saying exactly that once:

Let's go and get it from those who've got it.

David goes on to the various ways the Obamites are implementing that
philosophy, and the list is sobering.

I say "sobering", because one of the proposals is a massive hike in
taxes on beer, wine, and liquor.

David also recalls the words written 233 years ago:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of
Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

Try saying that to an Obamalator today, and the reply would no doubt
be: "You say that like it's a bad thing!"

One of the few actually good ideas John McCain had during the
campaign was to replace the tax break for employer-paid health
plans with an individual tax credit. (Genius Harvard Econ Prof Greg Mankiw
liked it; so did Cato's Michael Cannon.)

And, of course, McCain was relentlessly demagogued on the issue by Obama
and Biden.

All the more ironic then is the Obama Administration's willingness
to embrace the idea now. The difference being that McCain's proposal
empowered individuals and their private health care choices; Obama's
looking for money to grease the skids toward a totally socialized
system making us all more dependent on government.

This was number 2 on Shikha Dalmia's list of Obama's
health care lies blogged yesterday.
Today, however, you should read a couple in-depth takedowns of this
brazenly dishonest Barackrobatic hypocrisy by an NRO tag team:
(1) Jim Geraghty with the text
version recounting the $44 million in Obama campaign ad buys
savaging the proposal; (2) Guy Benson with a video collection of YouTubed
examples.

The "Troubled Asset Relief Program" (TARP) was a horrible idea, but at least
offered the prospect that taxpayer funds could be eventually "paid back"
by the bailed-out financial institutions.

But now Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services
Committee, has come up with a proposal to spend any TARP profits before
they can be returned to the taxpayers. Last Friday, Frank introduced
the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits
from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals
favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats.

Moral: once you send money down the rathole, the rats won't
give it back without a fight.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

Ah, this is more like it. Good guys. Bad guys. Guys sticking together
through thick and thin. True love. Ships shooting at each other with
cannons. Outwitting the French. It's all here.

Gregory Peck plays the title character in this 1951 action-adventure
movie. As near as I can tell, he doesn't bother with an English accent.
He travels the world for King and Country, and he's not one to back down
from a scrape.

It's a lot of fun. Great special effects for 1951.
(I was about to say: they don't make them like this
any more, but every so often, they do.)

Gene Roddenberry sold the idea of Star
Trek
as kind of a Hornblower-in-space. Many parallels are
noted here. I
think it's arguable that Alexander Courage kind of ripped off a measure
or two of this movie's theme for the show as well.

URLs du Jour

2009-07-01

Barackrobatics du Jour: At Forbes, Shikha Dalmia rattles off President
Obama's top five lies about health care; two during the campaign
to get himself elected, three in current rotation to snooker
the American people into acquiescence. See if you can
guess them before clicking over.

We can add at least one lie to the total that Ms. Dalmia
doesn't specifically mention: Candidate Obama's promise:

"I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under
my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of
tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your
capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

David Freddoso transcribes
the recent tergiversations of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs
as he was pressed to reaffirm that (already broken) "firm pledge".

If you weren't completely outraged by the passage of the Waxy-Markman
Crap-N-Fade bill—I'm so put out I'm even making third-grade
puns, you'll notice—Ed Morrissey notes one
of the last-minute provisions to buy the vote of an Ohio Congresswoman
(quoting a Washington Times story):

They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep.
Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she
wanted - a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state's
Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in
taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic
development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.

And that's only one example; the bill is shot through
with similar larcenies against your tax money.

If you haven't done so already,
I urge you to check the vote tally to
determine how your representative voted.

And you probably need to get your blood pressure down after that.
Ladies and gentlemen, Web Site
Story:

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